Divine Boom
by augustadacica
Summary: Necessity is only ever the mother of invention; it is up to imagination to do the rest. A  light, fun  pun-intended   burst of whimsy to the prompt, 'Lucius, Hermione, raspberries.' Future!fic AU, of the EWE kind


Had the Floo in the main study not alerted Lucius that his wife and youngest offspring had returned, the task itself would have proved no challenge for the thundering of impatient little feet and the 'Dad! Dad!' shouted at the top of a not as little voice; not when they had surely been amply sufficient to rouse the whole house besides.

The child did have a particular flair for demanding attention in exorbitant amounts.

Not for the first time, Lucius permitted himself a wide and particularly indulgent smile. The boy's mother had, on the more trying occasions, assured him she had never been this rambunctious at that age; and Lucius himself would, of course, continually neglect to mention that _he had_. She never asked, after all.

He rose, fighting a wince at the sliver of pain curling along his left knee, and made his way out towards the family room, as Hermione had taken to calling it. It was custom to adjourn there after she and Claudius returned from outings where he was less in favour, which he thought well described today's visit to the new Potter home.

Claudius, of course, met him at the door — against which he was propped and swinging in wide arcs from the wall out to the entryway.

Ah. One of _those_ visits, then.

"Daddy, you're here!" his cherubic imp said in greeting, gazing up at him with a wide, tiny-toothed grin.

Lucius fought not to inhale too deeply. Overexcited _and_ particularly affectionate; it had clearly been one of those visits.

"Claudius," he greeted patiently. A brief caress of his son's head stilled him, and Lucius immobilised the door at its widest with a silent command. As expected, Claudius plunged all ten fingers into his curls the minute his father's hand had lifted off them. His face was scrunched up in irritation: of late, any touch to his hair bar his own was not to be borne. Mussed him up something terrible, per his grumbles.

Lucius quickly made his way around his pouting son, before the boy forgot about his hair and attached himself to his robes.

"Wait, but daddy —"

Could the effort be considered superhuman, that he ignored the occasional slip when his son resorted to whinging? Lucius liked to think so — although, after the prolonged such lapses which had shaped Draco's childhood, his mind had been made up for a time now, which rendered the whole question largely moot.

"Welcome home, darling."

Hermione looked at him warmly: amused, if slightly frayed around the edges. Lucius could hardly blame her; not after some hours spent in comparatively confined quarters at the same time as multiple Weasleys. She leaned up and into him as eagerly as ever when he kissed her, the first since they'd engaged in their prelude to the crack of dawn that morning.

"Da', wait, you're s'posed to be listening to me!" Their little dervish, who had plodded his way over and was now off to Lucius's left, gave the hardwood flooring a mighty stomp of his foot, despite knowing the consequences. "You can smooch Mum later!"

Hermione snickered. Undeterred, Lucius savoured their kiss as he was meant to and pulled away leisurely, then pressed his lips to hers again a brief two times.

Their son, of course, was fidgeting from head to toe when they turned his way.

"Smooch?"

The sneer couldn't be helped. Neither, he noted with no amount of surprise, could Hermione's eye-roll.

"As you can guess — James. I don't know where he picked it up, or actually from whom, but I'm almost sure it was his first 'Claudius, I have to tell you,' of the day."

Were Lucius a lesser man, he might have had a stress headache coming his way.

Claudius's fidgeting was becoming a concerted squirm. To his credit, he didn't attempt to relay whichever story must have been behind the '_smooching_'.

"You know that's no use, Claudius," Hermione said. Too right; like most of the methods of discipline employed in the new Malfoy home, this particular punishment had been of her making. By that point, Lucius had grown to know his wife well enough not to be surprised by her devious inventiveness, and besotted enough that he could be openly admiring of it.

"But mum!"

"Afraid not, darling."

Despite a success rate that didn't lean within hexing distance of his favour, Claudius was never hesitant to turn tremulous eyes on either of his parents. They both gave in from time to time, of course, because it was important to bolster a young wizard's first attempts at charm and bribery; but they did not give in so often as to make him think he wouldn't have to work for it, then or in future.

"Fine." He huffed, sounding every bit as put-upon as his age and inclinations enabled him. "'m sorry."

Muttered sullenly into his shoes, the apology wasn't what common sense might proclaim convincing. Lucius squeezed Hermione's hand and lowered himself to a crouch. His knee, he noted with the slightest of relief, behaved.

"Claudius…"

There was a complicated bit of wriggle set in motion, wherein a foot shaken hopefully inside its little boot did not so much as twitch within those confines, and the sole it rested on did not budge in the slightest from the floor.

"Daddy!" Tremulous eyes hastily entered a strategic partnership with a trembling chin and a studiously pouted lower lip. Lucius, who had been no stranger to employing such tactics wherever they had odds of working, mentally commended their current mode of application. Unfortunately for Claudius, this was more a case of the Mudbl— er, _mouse_ trying to charm the basilisk.

"Claudius, what do we do when we ignore a rule in a way that has us get caught? Hmm?"

And just like that, his son's gaze darkened with determination. Claudius greeted each imparting of Life Lessons solemnly, and his parents were happy to blame this on each other when they didn't try to take credit of their own.

"We take stock of the new position we've put ourselves in, and we know that it falls to us to get ourselves out."

At his side, Hermione coughed, very delicately; not in disagreement, Lucius thought for certain. Claudius frowned a few long moments, eyes closed.

"All right. I'm sorry," he announced with feeling. This time, the wriggled foot lifted and moved entirely, as easily as though it had never been caught in a conditional sticking charm. For good measure it seemed, Claudius immediately gave a brief shake of his other foot. "_Now_ can I tell you?"

Lucius nodded, and that was all it took for Claudius to be grinning hugely again. He pressed a sloppy kiss to his father's cheek then plopped down on the floor and began the production of yanking off his footwear.

"That's better. Aunt Ginny wouldn't let me run around her garden barefoot, even though I promised I'd be careful, because she said James promised too and then he scraped his foot really hard on a sharp rock — he showed me his bruise, Dad, even with bruise paste it's still really huge!

"Uncle George said that was nothing, though, that one time, he and Uncle Fred made Mu—"

"Ah, Claudius, I think we can skip past that one, love." Hermione Conjured an enormous, overstuffed pillow and sat, cross-legged, next to their son. "Your father really doesn't need to hear all the details of that little incident."

Only now, of course, Lucius felt he most certainly did need to hear about it.

In the meantime, Claudius had chucked his boots to opposite corners of the room, had scrambled to his feet simultaneously, and was pouting his way straight into his mother's personal space.

Lucius took to counting down the seconds.

With a fall of diffuse, shifting-coloured light — because it was a show of flash of the sort that delighted Claudius to no end — Hermione produced a giant, plush monstrosity. The boy grinned ear to ear, somehow gasping his delight at the same time.

"Wow, a Blast-Ended Skrewt! Thanks, mum!" He looped his arms around his mother's neck, permitted her a kiss to the tip of his nose, then clambered onto his latest… _thing_.

Taking pains to look as put-upon as he could for their benefit, Lucius joined the two on the floor. He very deliberately did not enlarge Hermione's pillow, which ensured agreeable combinatorial effects all over, and hid an easy grin into her hair.

* * *

><p>One thing that was very easy to overlook when inviting Claudius to provide an overview of his day was how proficient he was at talking. He required no prompting and barely saw fit to waste time on breathing. The only indication, as experience had taught, that he was close to winding down was the sorry state to which he'd reduced the facsimile beast Hermione had Conjured. For something that was barely two hours old, its colour looked like it had seen better <em>weeks<em>, and it had stuffing leaking out of orifices sure to be less than anatomically accurate.

"Oh! Then, after dessert, Aunt Ginny told me I could go in the back, '_shoes on_'," he mimicked, "and have some raspberries, because they were bursting. They weren't, though; they were just normal. Only some of them were really dark and ripe and they just squished all over my fingers." Not without a bit of prior effort, Lucius deduced. "James, Albus and I had a contest whose fingers would be reddest fastest." And thus, rather more than just a bit of effort. "Then I found a huge bug on one of them, just before I ate it, and I caught it and flicked it one-handed right over the fence. I think it went really far! James wanted a bug too but we couldn't find another one, only a spider and it ran off too fast to catch."

Under Lucius's head, Hermione's shoulder gave a twitch.

Claudius shrugged nonchalantly and paused to clasp some more stuffing between his palms, then spin it out of his plush skrewt. A minute or so later, he raised his eyes to his parents, setting Lucius's heart _just aflutter_ with the shrewd calculation in his gaze.

"Dad. Could _we_ have bursting raspberries? We could, right? I bet those are really cool!"

Bursting—

As one, Hermione and Lucius turned to each other and traded a look. It was the sort of look that florid insistence would claim made mere mortals tremble. All told, it was a look that made the Malfoy spouses tremble, too, but in very different places and therefore in very different ways.

* * *

><p>In the end, it did take a bit of doing. Some months of research and calculations and effortless bids to out-swot each other, for which they quite naturally rewarded themselves with copious lovemaking. Some other months of close and thorough collaboration, initiated when they lent themselves the particular talents of their most obvious choice in enthusiast. Only a short while after, the <em>Rubus idaeus<em> 'Divine Boom' — indeed, that was what you got when Neville Longbottom's rights to nomenclature went and played with anagrams — was a fully recognised cultivar: the first sort of berries to burst into starred shapes as soon as they reached peak ripeness, to the imminent delight of children the magical world over. It didn't, after that first resounding success, take too much time or prodding for other varieties, such as the phoenix-flamed 'Dumbledoreana', the fluttery, black, lily-shaped _laciniatus_ 'Princeps', and the hissing, yellow-fanged 'Serpens', to follow.

And it was thus that Claudius, bright and cunning Granger-Malfoy scion, made his first, inadvertent mark on the venerable family fortune at the very tender age of six.

* * *

><p>'Divine Boom', <em>you will have gathered, can be found in the names of Claudius Malfoy and the very dear Neville Longbottom. It seemed like just the right touch of whimsy on Neville's part as to be in line with his long experience in, and some might say propensity for, making things go 'boom'.<em>

_With small exceptions, European raspberries belong to the species **Rubus idaeus**. **Rubus laciniatus**, also native and a close relative, is a prickly shrub bearing tastier, milder black berries._

_The 'Princeps' was only designed to flutter after extensive experimentation proved raspberries to be incompatible with outright billowing. This Prince may not count as half-blooded, but I can fondly imagine Harry growing one in a pot in his office, asking Hermione to charm it so it can sneer at visitors who vex him._

_In taxonomy, per the_ ICNCP, _cultivars are designated by botanical name followed by a specific epithet. Don't ask me how long it really takes to get one recognised; let's assume there was some happy combination of forces at work that could can sever the knots of bureaucracy with ease._


End file.
